central

As I have already said, one of my favourite things in Hong Kong is how nature keeps fighting for its rights. Within 10 minutes of the densest parts of the city, there’s jungle and you would not know the city is nearby. Even in the most urban areas, there are massive trees and the plants survive. My bet is, if the city was abandoned, within months the plants would take back what’s rightfully theirs…

One of the things I wanted to do with a wide-angle lens was vertical shots of Hong Kong. It’s such a vertical city that these vertical scapes offer great variety. In Central of course is where the buildings are the highest…

I’ve only recently started composing using wide-angle opportunities offered by street adverts. This one was shot during my film period after my digital camera got stolen and before my new digital camera was purchased.

The Erhu is a Chinese violin that sounds atrocious to my European ears. But when you find an Erhu player on an overpass in Central and that he lets you take your time shooting a portrait, you can tolerate the sound for a few seconds, open nearly all the way to f/1.4 and get a nice bokeh in the background of your street portrait !

There’s a tiny street in the Mid-Levels called Gage street that feels a lot more like China than most of Hong Kong. It’s got this open air wet market with the meat and fish on display just like in Shanghai. I love it and probably need to get back there.

There are some areas in Central where the sky is so far out due to high buildings that it feels like night anyway. This is especially true in really narrow alleyways such as this one. What grabbed my eye was the green light reflected on the tile wall, and then this guy walked passed me.

I spent a short week in Hong Kong recently, and went out nearly every night to try and capture the particular atmosphere of the city after dusk. I was mostly on Hong Kong Island around Central (my favourite part of HK anyway) and this week I will share photos from a series I entitled Hong Kong Mood, trying to express what makes Hong Kong what it is visually. I was greatly helped by the incredible low-light performance of the Fuji x100s with virtually no grain at ISO 3200. Liberating.